Pro-choice - But Still The Best Choice

While the Democrats enforced party-line conformity at their convention in Boston, Republicans will display an impressive show of party diversity in New York. A conservative president from Texas will share the stage with the liberal Republican governors of California and New York--and also with the man he defeated for the nomination four years ago, John McCain.

None of those divergent voices, however, will command more attention than that of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The convention is meeting three years almost to the day that Mr. Giuliani galvanized the whole nation with his leadership of a city under terrorist attack. The events of that day made him a national icon. If Vice President Cheney holds to his intention not to seek higher office, the memory of 9/11 could make Mr. Giuliani a powerful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, if not the very most powerful.So while the text of Mr. Giuliani's message will deal with the issues of 2004, many of his auditors will be listening for hints about the issues of four years hence.

Many of those issues will be new and unpredictable. But for Mr. Giuliani personally, none of those issues will be more challenging than that of abortion.

Mr. Giuliani is a strongly pro-choice politician in a party whose nominations are decided by pro-life primary voters. Since the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade in January 1973, only once have the Republicans nominated a presidential candidate who did not take a strong anti-abortion line--that was back in 1976, the candidate was an incumbent president, and even so he won renomination only by the narrowest margin of any major-party candidate since William Howard Taft beat back Theodore Roosevelt's insurgency in 1912.

Yet Mr. Giuliani's presidential hopes need not be doomed by this record. Unlike past pro-choice Republicans who failed to win a national role for themselves, Mr. Giuliani is not a conventional liberal. On almost every issue except abortion, Mr. Giuliani is positioned to appeal strongly to Republican conservatives in all regions of the country.

Mr. Giuliani has made it clear that he intends to speak in New York primarily about the 9/11 attack and its meaning. That's probably a good call. But if he does aspire to higher leadership, sooner or later--and ideally sooner--he must find words to narrow the gap between himself and his potential constituents inside the Republican Party.

What should he say? What can he say?

Start with what he should not say. He should not try to deny or conceal his own views: The issue is too big and too important to be ignored, and his own record is too well known.

He should not invoke Lee Atwater's "big tent": That's a good slogan for defining the party's approach to its members--but Mr. Giuliani is seeking to become his party's leader.

Nor should he spend minutes and minutes parsing his views on the matter: His job is not to persuade pro-life Republicans to agree with him, but to assure them that they can live with him.

Nobody has ever doubted Rudy Giuliani's ability and willingness to stand up for what he believes in. Now he must prove that he can understand and work with fellow Republicans who believe differently about one of the party's sharpest lines of division--without scolding, recrimination, or unnecessary division. That will take a gentle touch.

Approaching the issue from the other side, then-Governor Bush handled the topic note-perfectly at Philadelphia in the summer of 2000: "Good people can disagree on this issue, but surely we can agree on ways to value life by promoting adoption, parental notification."

How could a candidate Giuliani emulate George W. Bush's deftness from the opposite side? Maybe with a three point message similar to this:

"Members of our party hold many different views on abortion. Yet whether we call ourselves pro-life or pro-choice, we all know that abortion is a sadness, and we can all be glad that abortion is becoming steadily more rare in the United States.

"For 30 years, members of our party have worked for greater respect for innocent life in this country: for the unborn, for the disabled, for victims of crime, for the elderly, for victims of terror. And that work goes on. Today our challenge is to use the achievements of science and medicine to serve humanity--and never allowing science to treat some human beings as mere tools for the use of others.

"The Republican party came into being to protest a Supreme Court decision that denied the rights and citizenship of African-Americans: the Dred Scott decision. In the 21st century as in the 19th, it is essential that we appoint judges who honor the limits of their office and the original intentions of the Framers of the Constitution."

Those three points--acknowledgment of the good intentions of people on the other side of the issue; the searching out of common ground on a broad range of life issues; and a commitment to appoint judges who understand why Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided--could go far to soothe opposition to Mr. Giuliani among pro-life Republicans.

This will be a very difficult election for the GOP; and 2008 could be harder still. Republicans may not be able to win presidential elections in the future in the way that they have won them in the past. Pro-life Republicans are shrewd: They understand the tough new electoral map as well as anyone. They may be in a mood to be wooed by a candidate who cannot meet them all the way--but who shows them respect, meets at least some of their concerns, and looks like a future winner.